Stone Soup for the Designer Soul

Ah, there’s nothing as rejuvenating as some good ol’ stone soup.

Last Tuesday, the DES 001 class was given the opportunity to work within groups to create a piece of design—anything that we envisioned—out of a pile of nothing. What may seem like a difficult task actually turned out to be the ultimate showcasing of creativity and artistic vision. As design students, we set out to make something brilliant. Our weapons? Recyclable scraps. Our battlefield? The trees and grass of Hutchinson Drive. Our strategy? To let our imaginations run wild.

And that’s exactly what we did.

Tissue paper, glitter glue, picture frames, painter suits—these were just a few of the ingredients that went into making stone soup. If one were to walk by in the midst of our stone soup-making, he or she would most likely think we were college students reliving our kindergarten creativity days. I’m not going to lie, that’s exactly how I felt when I was helping my group build the ultimate Aggie manor out of cardboard boxes. At first, the idea of creating anything we wanted was overwhelming. After all, in the words of Michael Bierut, “…design is about everything.” So where do you possibly start?

But as we slowly got the ball rolling—cardboard boxes were stacked, cartons were cut up and flags were made—I began to wonder about the “doing” of design. Is it simply intuition, like how our group was randomly putting pieces together based on instinct? Or is it more of following a vague blueprint that we constantly picture, like how our group worked towards the goal of creating some sort of house? This stone soup experience made me question our ways of thinking when fitting together pieces of a puzzle, pieces of a soon-to-be design. Sometimes we know what the puzzle will look like in the end. Other times we are blindly trying to fit pieces together, hoping that something will eventually click.

Honestly, I don’t think I got my answer that day. And looking at other groups’ masterpieces, one could argue that the “doing” of design included a mix of both intuition and planning. But I guess in the end, such questions don’t matter. What really matters is the end result—the stone soup. It is the stone soup that is the most delicious result of all.